


Anachronisms / Fear and Understanding

by anacrusisnt



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Danse POV, F/M, Slow Burn, Sole Survivor POV, We're updating this as we're going along folks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-10
Updated: 2018-05-10
Packaged: 2019-05-04 17:16:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14597847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anacrusisnt/pseuds/anacrusisnt
Summary: Morgan Espinoza, a decorated war veteran and CIT Robotics alumnae, is perfectly content to spend the next few years after The Battle of Anchorage tending bar and reading mystery novels while she figures her life out. Instead she's mistaken for Nora, Shaun's real mother, and transported 210 years after the end of the world.When Paladin Danse first meets Morgan, he worries that they won't get along. But she likes to tinker, and to read, and she understands what it's like to have war take something you love away from you. He learns that there is a worse fear than having no one understand you, and that's having someone who does.But who are Danse and Morgan, really? What life path, what formative decisions have brought them to this exact point in time to find each other?Goes through the events of Fallout 4 and some DLC content.





	Anachronisms / Fear and Understanding

**Author's Note:**

> When mods first became a thing on Xbox One, I found an alternate start mod that still brought you to the Vault, but got your pod "switched" with Nate/Nora, thus keeping you alive. It seemed like an interesting story line--is survivor's guilt enough of a motivator for someone to move heaven and earth in a post-apocalyptic wasteland? And who knows survivor's guilt better than our favorite Paladin?
> 
> I haven't been able to track that mod down since, so I think it disappeared. If any of you manage to find it, don't hesitate to shoot me a comment so I can give credit where credit is due. It's a cool plot device.

_Mahoney's Pub_

 

“Excuse me, sir?” Morgan called nervously from the entry of Mahoney’s Pub.

The large man behind the bar looked up from weighing some liquor. He was older, his hair at this point was grey with a pepper of ginger throughout, and had the kind of physique that implied that he was, at one point, muscular, but now gone to fat. He returned to weighing the liquor without so much of a thought towards the woman at the door. “No solicitors.”

“Uh…” Anxiety abounded through Morgan as it had so many times since she returned to Boston. _Christ,_ she was bad with people. “I’m not selling anything."

“Oh. We’re not open for another hour,” he called out behind him, his thick Boston accent turning words like ‘hour’ into ‘awah’.

"No, I know that. You’re Patrick Mahoney, right?”

The man sighed and put the bottle of vodka he was weighing back on the shelf, “Well, this is Mahoney’s Pub, and I happen to be the owner and proprietor of Mahoney’s Pub, so yes, that would make me Patrick Mahoney.” He smirked and leaned his forearms onto the bar. “Something I can do for you, miss?”

“Yeah. I served in Anchorage with your son, Corey. We were in the same company.”

His face fell and he exhaled sharply, as if a punch in the gut took all the air out of him. His lean against the bar became heavier, as if he now needed it to keep him upright. “Is that so?” he wheezed.

Morgan hazarded a few steps in from the doorway, “Yeah.”

Patrick nodded at the bar stool directly across from him, and only then did she finally have the courage to cross to the bar. “Would you like a drink?” he asked as Morgan began to unzip her thick winter jacket.

Morgan put the jacket on the stool and sat atop of it. “I thought you didn’t open for another hour,” she joked, an attempt to lighten the heavy air around the two of them. She nervously tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

The corner of his mouth lifted, “What’s the point of owning your own bar if you can’t make exceptions for someone who served with your dead kid?”

Morgan nodded silently, and Patrick procured two small glasses. He didn’t ask what Morgan wanted, just took a bottle of scotch from a middle shelf and muttered something about how “Mahoneys love their scotch” as he poured it into both glasses. He looked back up at Morgan, “You want a mixer?” Morgan nodded again, and he filled the rest of the glass up with soda from the bar. He kept his scotch neat.

Morgan took a sip of her drink and looked around the bar. Mahoney’s was a mixture of dive bar and Irish pub. There were some decorations—Irish flags, football and _‘football’_ jerseys in frames, a few newspaper clippings, but the rest of the décor seemed to have been haphazardly added as time went on with no real regard for theme. The lights were dim, mostly concentrated over the bar, with a few neon signs advertising various beer brands on the wall by the pool table. In one corner, a rickety hunk of plywood that served as a makeshift stage for bands, probably including Corey’s band at one point. The stage was empty, devoid of instruments or equipment, although a piano rested on the far wall to the side of the stage, its cover closed and its surface lined with dust.

She smiled, “Corey talked about this place a lot.”

“Did he now?” Patrick took a sip of his scotch, not wincing at all as it went down.

“Sure. Said you saved up all your life for it, finally bought it when he was in high school.”

Patrick smiled sadly, “He counted down the days until he was old enough to get his bartending license so he could work here.” Patrick grabbed a frame hanging on the back wall of the lowest shelf, by the cash register, and handed it to Morgan. “His first shift.”

Corey and Patrick standing behind the bar. Both of them looked much younger—Corey was far wirier here than when Morgan first met him, and Patrick’s hair was bright red, just like Corey’s. Patrick’s arm was slung around Corey, and both of them were beaming as if it was the proudest moment of their lives. At the time, it probably was.

Morgan felt hot tears pricking at the corner of his eyes. She handed the frame back to Patrick and wiped at them with the sleeve of her sweater. “That reminds me,” she said as she pulled the manila envelope from the inside of her purse and placed it on the bar top.

Patrick stared at it in silence, sipping at his drink.

“This is, uh… What I came here for. My mom did this thing, while I was in Anchorage. She sent me disposable cameras, asked me to take pictures of stuff. Wanted to see what a ‘day in the life’ was for me over there. So, I took pictures of dumb stuff—my bunk, my friends, my lunch sometimes,” she chuckled. “I’d mail it back to her, and she’d develop the photos. Anyway, Corey was one of my closest friends in the company, so I took a bunch of pictures of us. Now that I’m back… I figured it would only be fair to see if you wanted any of them.”

Patrick put down his glass and picked up the envelope, heavy with photos. There had to be at least thirty. Morgan continued, “I picked out the ones I didn’t think looked like total garbage. You can take as many of them as you want.”

Patrick took the photos out of the envelope and shuffled through them. The silence hung in the air for a painfully long time as he examined each one. Finally, he stopped at one, and his hand flew to his mouth. He didn’t cry, but he also didn’t move for a long time, as if he feared he was about to. Finally, the hand at his mouth reached for the scotch and he took a long swig. “You know, Corey’s draft number just came up, much as I hated that it did. And when he died, I didn’t want any fucking reminders of the stupid war that took him. They framed the flag that they laid over his coffin, and it’s sitting in my attic, along with his chest of all his belongings from over there. So, I didn’t think I would want any photos.”

He pulled out the photo he had been looking at and showed it to Morgan. She remembered it pretty well—Corey had taken the disposable camera and decided to waste all the film taking photos of himself while Morgan tried to wrestle the camera back. Most of them were incredibly blurry—which her mom wrote about being ‘hilarious’ when she went to get them developed—but one in particular was clear enough that Morgan felt it could be included.

The two of them. Corey took the photo from above, holding it far higher than Morgan’s reach, but that didn’t stop her from trying. Morgan’s face looked annoyed as she reached out to try to grab it, mouth agape, and Corey’s face was bunched up in a goofy pose. They hadn’t been wearing their uniform jackets or hats, so from the angle, they just looked like they were wearing the same colored shirt. No telltale signs that they were in the Army of any kind—the photo could have been taken anywhere.

Patrick smiled, “I like this one, though. Think I’ll keep it.” He went to the open wall by the cash register and put the framed picture of him and his son back on the nail in the wall. He also put the photo of Morgan and Corey right next to it, and attached it with a thumbtack. “I’ll frame that later.”

“It’s a good one.”

“A good one,” Patrick echoed.

Morgan took a long sip of her drink, “Corey was a great man. He always had your back—whether it was a firefight, a bar fight, of if you were just plain homesick. You raised a good kid, Patrick.”

Patrick audibly sniffed, “I did the best I could.”

“You did great,” she affirmed. “I actually think Corey was my guardian angel in disguise, because despite all of my idiocy in Anchorage, I didn’t get shot until he was already gone.”

Patrick’s eyebrows raised, “That so?”

“Yeah, in the shoulder.” She tapped her right arm affectionately. “Didn’t do much damage, but enough that the Army sent me home once the firefight had died down. I got lucky, and it’s kinda unfair, when you think about it. Corey’s the one who should have deserved a lucky break more than anyone.”

Patrick nodded solemnly and let that sit for a few seconds before changing the subject, “So you went home right after Anchorage, huh? That was two months ago.”

She frowned, “I’m sorry it took so long for me to get these photos to you. I wanted to, I figured it would be a nice gesture, and I don’t live very far from here. I just… I didn’t have the courage to sort through them. I think I finally did it so my mom would stop bugging me.”

Patrick barked a laugh, “Well, I appreciate it all the same.” He lifted his glass in a toast, “To Corey.”

“To Corey,” Morgan echoed as she clinked her glass to Patrick’s and took a swig.

“Fuck, here we are, reminiscing about Corey, and I don’t even know your name.”

“Oh, sorry.” She stuck her hand out and shook his. “Morgan Espinoza.”

“Morgan Espinoza,” he repeated. His eyes widened, “ _Shit._ So _you’re_ Morgan. _The_ Morgan?”

“Does my reputation precede me?” she asked, a nervous chuckle passing through her lips.

“Yes and no. I haven’t heard much about you—for good reason, Corey never talked about Anchorage while he was over there and I didn’t like asking—but there’s a few things in the trunk of his belongings the Army gave me that are actually yours.”

“ _Mine_?” Morgan was incredulous. She didn’t think she had left Corey with anything of hers.

“Or, well, they’re meant for you, anyway.” Patrick drummed his hands on the bar in an odd, syncopated rhythm. “They’re all in the attic—I live above here. Stay right here, little missy, and don’t move a muscle.” With that, Patrick disappeared through the back door behind the bar, which led to the storage room and probably also contained stairs to the second floor.

To pass the time, Morgan picked up the envelope of photos that Patrick had decided not to keep. These were hers to do with as she pleased, she supposed. She shuffled through the photos.

The barracks. Corey and a few of her friends sitting on their bunks, their hats off and uniform jackets open. Nevins smiling at the camera. Beckham flipping her the bird. Corey sitting on his bunk, strumming away at his guitar, mouth slightly open as if singing something, brow furrowed in deep thought.

The three of them in the previous photo, plus Morgan, standing in front of a heavily armored truck. The sky above them was dark grey and overcast with a mixture of weather and war. Nevins and Beckham in their power armor, but with their helmets off. Corey and Morgan in their uniforms, sniper rifles slung over their shoulders. Nevins was grinning—Jesus, Nevins was always grinning—and Beckham managed at least a soft smile. Corey and Morgan were not. Corey was staunchly anti-war and was unafraid to tell you that if you could catch him drunk and away from a CO. He was a victim of the draft and nothing more. Morgan herself had long become disillusioned with the war by the time the photo was taken.

Morgan and Corey, again. She wasn’t sure who took the photo. _(Beckham, maybe? You couldn’t trust Nevins with his own two feet so she didn’t trust him with the cameras.)_ The two of them were leaning against a wall already crumbling with artillery fire. Morgan’s head to the side, her mouth agape, as if addressing someone off the sides of the camera. Corey’s head was turned towards Morgan, a ghost of a smile on his face.

God, that man loved her. There was never any doubt in her mind that he did.

The back door swung open and Patrick re-emerged with a small box in hand. “Thanks for guarding this place from looters,” he joked. Morgan merely gave a polite chuckle and sipped at her scotch as Patrick put the box on the bar and began rifling through it.

“Ah,” Patrick said after a few minutes, “here we are!” He pulled out a tape and handed it over to Morgan so she could read the label. “I didn’t listen because… it didn’t seem like any of my business.”

“ _Happy Birthday, Morgan!”_ the masking tape label declared in blue pen, along with a few drawings of stars. “The Battle of Anchorage was a week before my birthday.” She was still in the clinic from her bullet wound during it. She had spent it pretty much alone—a nurse had given her an extra pudding cup with a secretive smile and that was it. “Do you have, uh…” Morgan blinked a few times, hard, to ward away a flood of tears, although nothing could disguise her labored breathing. “Do you have a tape player?”

“The stereo that connects to the sound system is under the bar.” Patrick held his hand out for the tape and set to work. There was a telltale _pop!_ and hum as the sound system turned on, and then a clicking sound as Patrick put the cassette into the player. It whirred for a few seconds before anything came through the sound system.

“ _Hey, Morgan…”_ The second Corey’s voice came through the speakers, she gasped, feeling like she had been punched in the gut. Patrick also seemed to turn a few shades paler.

_"So… Happy birthday! I, uh, I wrote this song for you. I’ve been working on it for a while, but it’s hard to find a moment of privacy around here. Hopefully Nevins is going to keep the barracks empty enough that I can get this recorded. Provided I don’t fuck it up. So… yeah. Here goes:”_

There was the unmistakable sound of Corey counting himself in, clicking the triplet rhythm to himself, accenting the first click in each, before entering in with his guitar.

—And suddenly, Patrick was below the bar, hitting the eject button on the tape player. “Sorry…” he muttered sheepishly as he waited for it to spit out the tape. “I just… haven’t been able to listen to him play since he died. I don’t know if I ever will. He’s got a bunch of tapes upstairs, if you want them.”

Morgan nodded and held her cupped hands out for the tape. Patrick placed it in them as if it were made of glass. “Maybe later,” she responded to Patrick’s offer as she placed the tape in her purse. She wasn’t sure if she could hear Corey play either, to be honest.

“Regardless, it’s nice you’re here, Morgan. You a Concord girl?”

“Uh, yeah. No. Kind of.” She cleared her throat. “Well, I grew up in Quincy, spent a couple years in Cambridge while I went to college. My mom and I moved to Concord a couple of years ago.”

“Gotcha. What else have you been doing since coming home to Boston? Other than procrastinating on sorting through photos?”

“Honestly? Not much. The bullet grazed my shoulder, so my arm was in a sling for a lot of it.”

Patrick picked up his glass and drained it, slamming it back down on the bar. He grinned, “How’d you like a job?”

* * *

 

 _S_ _tep One_

 

Morgan awoke to what felt like the world’s worst brain freeze.

In hindsight, that was a terrible pun, but it was genuinely what she felt at the time.

It took a few moments for her to get her bearings. Her lungs felt like she had been walking for hours in the worst Boston winter she could remember. Each inhalation was so painful that it burned. Her sinuses felt frozen solid. As her memory gradually de-fogged— _ugh, another bad pun—_ she recognized that her entire surroundings were steel and frosted glass.

 _Decontamination pod._ That phrase stuck out in her head. _Fuck,_ her head pounded. That’s where she was. A decontamination pod in Vault 111. _Vault._ She had gone to the Vault. The bombs fell. _Bombs._

 _Decontamination pod. Vault. Bombs._ Right.

Morgan temporarily pushed those thoughts aside. In basic training and all the way through Anchorage, she was praised for her ability to act calm and calculated under pressure. In truth, it was the exact opposite—Morgan freaked out just as much, if not more, than other people, but she reacted a bit later than most. They once did a parachute drill and she was fine until the ride back to base, where she began hyperventilating. Corey joked that her brain was so slow to process things that she never got around to panicking until long after the fact. Maybe he was onto something there.

She could freak out later. She was in a decontamination pod and she was freezing. _Step one—get out of this pod._ She didn’t see any latch mechanism on the inside of the door. She went to touch the door, to search for some kind of release button or _something._ The steel of the door was so frozen it almost burned her skin. She retracted her hand with a hiss.

Morgan took a deep breath to calm herself. _Fine, it was fine. Step one revised—call for help._ This was a Vault, right? There had to be Vault Tec representatives running the show. Or even people stepping out of other pods. Someone would hear her.

She risked a tentative sound, “Hello?” Her voice cracked, as if it hadn’t been used in days. “ _Hellooooooooo,_ ” she called a bit louder. Worried about touching the freezing glass and steel with her hands, she kicked at the door with her boot. There wasn’t a lot of leg room—not enough to bend her knee and get a good kick in, she more shifted her weight and knocked at the door with the toe of her boot.

Through the frosted glass, a figure appeared. She couldn’t tell much about them, just that they were facing her and wearing some kind of Hazmat suit. “ _Oh thank god,”_ she muttered. “Uh, hi. Listen, you need to let me out of this pod _right now,_ okay? It’s freezing in here, my head hurts, I’m freaking out.”

The figure stared at her from behind their mask for a few moments before turning to the pod across from her.

Morgan pounded on the door with the flat of her palm—freezing metal be damned. “Hey. _Hey!_ Don’t just ignore me!” As she continued to slap, one of her fingernails scraped a thin line through the thin layer of ice on the window. “ _Yes,”_ she muttered to herself. “ _Perfect.”_ Like an ice scraper on a car windshield, she used her ten digits to claw a small hole in the ice at eye-level. Finally, she leaned over and breathed onto the circle of clear glass and rubbed with the sleeve of her Vault suit to widen it and clear the edges.

There were three people in front of her now—two in those odd Hazmat suits, the third looking like he had just walked out of that movie series where Australia had run out of gasoline and suddenly everyone was wearing leather and joining car gangs and shooting each other. Morgan couldn’t remember the name. For some reason, all she could think was _I Love Lucy,_ but that was definitely _not_ the answer.

She’d like to ask someone, if they’d just _fucking pay attention to her._

What were those people _doing_ with that pod across from her? _The pod across from her. Who was in the pod across from her?_

Right, Mrs. Callahan. Lucinda. Before Mamí had passed, they were good friends. Morgan remembered being relieved when she saw Mrs. Callahan’s face in the lobby of the Vault as they were issued their Vault suits and surrendered their belongings.

Except when they opened the pod across from Morgan, it wasn’t Lucinda Callahan.

It was… _Uh… What was that guy’s name?_ She remembered being told that he served in Anchorage, but Anchorage was a big place and they never ran into each other. He lived a few houses down the road and while they never interacted outside of a small smile in passing, he and his wife seemed like nice enough people. _Nate,_ she suddenly remembered. _His name was Nate Paulsen._

Why was Nate Paulsen in that pod? Wasn’t Mrs. Callahan in that pod?

Morgan observed through the clear circle in the glass, scratching and wiping so as to enlarge it. Nate was holding something in his arms. _A baby,_ Morgan thought. _Right. The Paulsens just had a kid._ She could remember seeing Nate and his wife walking around the neighborhood and pushing a stroller along.

One of the Hazmat people reached for the baby, but Nate seemed reluctant to let him go. They wrestled for a bit. Morgan began to pound on the glass again, this time with her fist, her heart hammering in her throat. “ _Stop that! What are you doing?”_

“ _No!”_ she could hear Nate’s muffled voice scream through the door. “ _I’m not giving you Shaun!”_

Morgan was flailing violently now, half-kicking at the door with her boot. Her body had enough of suppressing the panic that began to rise to the surface. Panic bubbled in her throat and came out as frantic gasps for the air that still crystallized her throat.

A loud _pop!—_ enough to ring through her pod and halt her frenzy. Leather Man had brought out a gun.

And just like that, Nate was dead.

Fear seized Morgan’s heart as she watched Nate’s figure slump to the side. One of the Hazmat people had the kid now, and they turned and walked out of view of Morgan’s porthole to the outside world.

 _Step two,_ Morgan thought— _do not draw the attention of Leather Man._ This was self-preservation, now.

But she had spent the last _who knows how long_ screaming and pounding at the door to her pod. One of the Hazmat people had looked at her, so they knew that she was there and awake. Were the other people in nearby pods awake? How many others had witnessed Nate get murdered in cold blood?

What had become, in a few seconds, Morgan’s worst nightmare came to reality. The Leather Man looked right at her and stepped towards her pod. Adrenaline rushed into Morgan’s veins and turned into figurative—and maybe even literal—ice. She had nowhere to go. She had no weapons. She felt like she had been hit in the head with a brick and left for dead in the Boston winter. She was _fucked._

As Leather Man stepped closer, his features became more apparent. Bald head, scarred face, rotten teeth. He smiled, or perhaps _leered_ was more apropos, at Morgan. Something about him seemed unsettling. He smiled like a shark. “Leave the backup,” the man sneered, tapping his fingers on the glass like she was a goldfish in a tank. His voice was like gravel.

“Backup?” Morgan pounded onto the glass with every ounce of energy she had. “What do you mean backup?” she called out as the man walked away. “ _Hey! Heeeeey!_ ”

“Put her back on ice,” came the Leather Man’s muffled call.

Morgan’s scream froze in her mouth.

 

And then it didn’t.

The door to the pod opened and Morgan stumbled out, desperate for something—warmth, solid ground, a breath of non-conditioned air, a cigarette, _something._ Her head pounded as she threw up on the cold, metal ground, but she wasn’t sure from what exactly. She tried to weakly call for help, but no one came to her aid. She was alone.

After a few minutes of reorienting which way was _fucking up,_ Morgan staggered to her feet, pushing the panic down with the promise of dealing with it twofold later.

She examined the pod across from her—Nate Paulsen, although it should have been Mrs. Callahan. Through the frost on the glass, she could see blood on Nate’s head. _Fuck._ The futile thought that she could save him nagged the back of her mind, but she dismissed it. She had seen Nate get shot clean in the head. When Morgan pulled at the lever mechanism on the pod, she found it was locked.

How had the Hazmat people gotten into Nate’s pod earlier? There had to be some sort of mechanism. She scanned down the long hallway of pods.

 _Whatever these pods were,_ Morgan concluded, _they weren’t decontamination._ Vault Tec had promised that the process would take two minutes. She had been in that pod far longer—although she wasn’t sure how much longer. She had no idea what was going on, and she hated it.

Her eyes stopped on a computer terminal and she breathed a sigh of relief. She approached it and tapped on a few keys to spring it to life. The home screen popped up without password input and Morgan thanked her lucky stars—she had taken a Computer Science class at CIT, but she wasn’t a hacker by any means.

 

 

 

 

> _Welcome to ROBCO Industries (TM) Termlink_
> 
> _Thank you for choosing Vault-Tec!_

 

 _You’re welcome,_ she thought bitterly. Time being of the essence, she scanned through the information found on the terminal, but what she saw gave her pause.

 

 

 

 

> _Cryogenic Array: Offline. Premature termination resulting in system failure._

 

 _Cryogenic… What?_ ‘Cryo’ meaning ‘frozen’. So they were frozen. Morgan put a pin in that thought and continued.

 

 

 

 

> _Life Support: Offline. Premature termination resulting in system failure._

 

Without even blinking, Morgan tapped on the “Pod Occupant Status” section.

She read every single name in that hallway, her stomach churning. Friends, neighbors. Dead, according to the computer. She read every single name, mouthing them and then running to check the pod for any sign of life. There was a mistake. There had to be a mistake.

 

 

 

 

> _Pod C1: Morgan Espinoza. Occupant status: Deceased. Cause of Death: Asphyxiation due to Life Support failure._

 

"C1. C1. C1.” She had taken two steps from the terminal to check on the pod before her brain had fully processed it. She went back. Read it again. Tried to process it again. She read it out loud, as if to cement it.

This information should have terrified her, but instead it almost encouraged her. There was a monumental enough error on the Vault Tec terminal that it listed her as dead. She clearly was not dead. So what else could this terminal be wrong about? Maybe all these other people were alive—just frozen.

Except for Nate Paulsen. Nate was pretty much dead.

 _“Pod Door Manual Override Engaged,”_ she read aloud, “ _Remote Override Engaged.”_ Two pods were flagged as different—Nate’s and the pod she came out of. ‘The pod she came out of’ because it was labeled in the Vault Tec terminal as belonging to Nora Paulsen.

But that couldn’t be right, obviously. Because she was Morgan Espinoza. Who was dead. _Fuck_ her head hurt.

She flipped back on the terminal to Pod C1—“Morgan Espinoza”—and, with some trepidation, hit the “release pod” command. She could hear a hiss down the hall as some sort of vacuum seal broke. _Here goes nothing,_ she thought as she crept up the hall.

She didn’t know why she was creeping. But the Vault Tec system had labelled everyone as dead, including her, and labelled her as Nora Paulsen. Anything could happen.

As she approached the pod, she wasn’t sure what to expect.

But she definitely didn’t expect Nora Paulsen, stone-still and covered in a layer of frost.

“Holy shit,” Morgan breathed. She stuttered a bit, unsure of what to do. “Uh… Nora? Nora.” She grabbed Nora’s shoulders and tried to shake her awake, but her neighbor was frozen and stiff as a board. Morgan held her fingers to Nora’s frosty pulse point but didn’t find a heartbeat.

“ _No_ ,” she whispered. “ _No.”_

So Nora was definitely dead. Her husband, Nate, just down the narrow hallway—dead. Everyone in the hallway—dead.

Unsure of what else to do, Morgan took a step back, shut the pod door, and collapsed in on herself for a few moments. She didn’t want the tears to fall because crying always gave her an awful headache, and she already felt like her skull had been caved in. The tears fell all the same as she curled up into a ball on the floor. The cool metal reminded her too much of the inside of the pod.

 _The cryo pod._ Vault Tec had lied to her—to her whole community—and for what purpose? And how had she ended up in Nora’s pod? Why was _she_ alive? Nothing added up, nothing gave her answers.

Morgan always liked mysteries, but she decided that she didn’t like living them.

 _Step one—get out of this hallway._ Whatever answers she was looking for, she wasn’t finding them here.

She couldn’t get up from the floor, so she broke it down into little steps like her therapist had taught her. _Step one—stand up. Step two—walk forward. Step three—get out of the hallway._

And she did exactly that. With a deep breath, Morgan pressed the door release button and stepped out into the main atrium of Vault 111.

 

After a thorough examination of the Vault, including employee, overseer, and recreation terminals, Morgan had come to some conclusions:

  1. There were giant fucking cockroaches everywhere, and that sucked.
  2. Vault 111 was designed to test the effects of cryogenics on human beings, and that was it. Her Vault was nothing more than a bunch of lab rats. They had never intended for her or anyone else to live out their days here—there were no living quarters for the Vault denizens, just rows and rows of pods. There had to be at least 200 people, and they all were dead. There were living quarters for the scientists, of course. They all seemed to have died or fled the Vault to God-knows-where.
  3. An employee terminal revealed some pertinent information—a mix-up during routine maintenance. While the floor was labelled with the name of each pod, the pods themselves were not labelled. Her and Nora’s pods had been removed from their location at the same time and had promptly been switched. By this point, the Vault experiment had been in full swing—the employees were busy with their mutiny against the Overseer… _blah blah blah._ Basically, Morgan was alive due to a labelling error on the part of some careless Vault Tec employees. That didn’t explain _why_ she was alive, however.
  4. That Cryolator thing looked cool as hell, but she couldn’t get into it. She tried for fifteen minutes to bash the lock with a fire extinguisher—nothing.
  5. Morgan Espinoza was the sole survivor of Vault 111 with one exception—the Paulsen baby who had been taken by those Hazmat people and the Leather Man.
  6. According to this nifty Pip-Boy she had taken off of a skeleton, the year was _Twenty-Two-Goddamn-Eighty-Seven. 2287._ She had been asleep for two-hundred-and-ten years. To the day, which was an astounding coincidence.



 

Morgan said these six points in her mental list a few times. She had long gotten over the fear of talking to herself. There was no one here to think she was crazy, because she was alone. Or maybe she was crazy, and in that case, why would she care? The end result was the same—she felt free to talk to herself as she stood at the elevator to Vault 111.

She had located the box with the few earthly possessions she had managed to bring to the Vault. She had handed them over upon issue of the Vault suit, with the promise that they would be decontaminated separately and handed back to her on the “other side”. It wasn’t much, really whatever she had on her when she entered—her clothes, the dog tags she was wearing around her neck, and a holotape, its label originally “ _Happy Birthday Morgan!”_ but now faded into illegibility over the centuries.

Morgan had no idea why Vault Tec kept her belongings, and the belongings of the other 200 residents. Maybe they were secretly sentimental, maybe the belongings themselves were some kind of experiment, or maybe they really did intend to release the frozen denizens at some point and wanted to give them something to remember the old world by. It didn’t matter.

She kept the Vault suit on. It was a bit more durable than the clothes she had entered the Vault with. _No idea what’s out there,_ she concluded, _but it includes giant fucking cockroaches._

Summoning all of her courage with a deep breath, she stepped onto the Vault elevator and hit the button. It rose with a creak that shook Morgan’s bones, but she held steadfast as she headed toward the surface with little more than a 10mm pistol. There was a baby boy out there somewhere.

God as her witness, Morgan Espinoza would not be the Sole Survivor of Vault 111.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This is a character study more than anything--each chapter will contain a flashback as well as a present-day section, alternating between Danse and Morgan POV. I'm just interested in working on connecting previous life events to current actions and behaviors while also adding depth to both characters. 
> 
> The way I write is very sporadic, with a lot of small scenes that require tying together, and creating a past/present narrative as well as TWO points of view means my work is quadrupled. I love this project, and I love writing it, but I don't see having an update schedule in the foreseeable future. The next 2-3 chapters are anywhere from 50-75% done. Kudos/comments are always a great motivator. 
> 
> This whole end note is a fancy way of saying that this is hella experimental but I'm willing to go on this journey if you are. Thanks for joining.


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